I would personally like to see a summary or description tag for the head
section of an XHTML document. This would allow the easier mining of data by
user agents. A user agent could extract this data for use in describing
bookmarks. The title tag is often not adequate for this purpose and
inputting summary's and descriptions by hand is a tedious process. As a
further suggestion, might I suggest that for both the title and the summary
attribute's allow an IDREF to be used within the document to specify that
the contents of a particular element should be used for the content of the
title and/or summary elements?
To show an example:
<head>
<title>Field Research into Bavarian Guinea Pigs</title>
<summary>Bavarian Guinea Pigs are known for their ostentatious
performances in the new arts.</summary>
</head>
OR
<head>
<title ref="#title" />
<summary ref="#summary" />
</head>
<body>
<section>
<h id="title">Field Research into Bavarian Guinea
Pigs</h>
<p id="summary"> Bavarian Guinea Pigs are known for
their ostentatious performances in the new arts.</p>
</section>
</body>
The second portion is entirely optional as it does complicate the content
model. Also consider a summary element as a child element for section.
This would allow the restriction of the content model if desired.
summary then becomes it's own module in XHTML 2.0. The summary element can
then be used as a child element to any block object. I specify block
objects here as being either <head>, <section> or <table>. Other
appropriate objects may come to mind as development progresses.
Orion Adrian